


Among the Cloud Banks

by novashyperion



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Father-Daughter Relationship, Father-Son Relationship, Friendship, Gen, Jaegercon Bingo 2013, Multi, Tumblr: jaegercon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-11-27
Updated: 2020-11-27
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:22:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27741436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/novashyperion/pseuds/novashyperion
Summary: Various PacRim one shots
Relationships: Mako Mori & Stacker Pentecost, Raleigh Becket & Mako Mori, Tendo Choi & Mako Mori
Comments: 4
Kudos: 3





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bingo - Dogtags
> 
> There are dogtags laying on Mako’s bed.

Leaving Raleigh’s side is a little difficult for Mako. They’ve been engaged in a neural bridge for so long and through so much, that they both are reluctant to part ways. He tells her she can come sleep in his room with him. His intentions are pure, Mako knows. They’re both looking for comfort. She agrees but tells him that she has to go back to her room for a little while, but she’ll join him later. Raleigh’s hand lingers on her cheek, and he smiles sadly, softly, and heads to his room.

When Mako enters her room,shutting the door as quietly as she can behind her, her tears are already spilling over. Mako leans heavily against the door and bites her lip as she cries. She stays like that a while, before she forces herself to lie down heavily on the bed. There’s a strange metallic sound when the bed accepts her weight and she buries her face in the sheets.

She reaches out blindly until she finds the cold metal and looks over at it. It’s Stacker’s dogtags, with Coyote Tango’s emblem expertly carved in on the back. Mako traces Stacker’s name over and over again with her thumb. She lies curled up on the bed, the dogtags secured in her hand, against her chest, for she doesn’t know how long.

When she finally gets up, she slings the tags over her neck, and heads to Raleigh’s room.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://shyfoxes.tumblr.com/post/57801121115/dogtags-mako-mori-stacker-pentecost-jaegercon-bingo


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bingo: Goodbye
> 
> In the beginning, Chuck never wanted to be a Ranger. He just wanted to be with his dad.

In the beginning, Chuck never wanted to be a Ranger. He just wanted to be with his dad. There’s a picture of Hercules Hansen in his Air Force uniform tucked under Chuck’s pillow every night. Every day he hopes his dad will come rushing through the door. Then he hopes any day. Eventually, he just hopes he’ll even come at all.

He’s nine when the first Kaiju appears, ripping into San Francisco. It’s massive, terrifying, and Chuck spends the rest of the year huddled against his mother, Angela, at night. His mother doesn’t discourage him.

Every moment Chuck can remember of his dad, he could only seem to remember his back, involved a goodbye. He’d see his dad’s broad back leaving, and wondered why he never seemed to look back. (Maybe in the Drift, years later, he’d learn how hard looking back for his dad would be, because he’d be leaving. Chuck refused to accepted that.) Scissure attacked Sydney, and his dad was suddenly bursting into his classroom and yanking him out. Three days later, Scissure was killed. As is his mother. 

Chuck cried for his mother every night, wishing she’d come back. He’d look over at his father every morning. Herc wavered around him, unsure what to say to him, how he should hold him. Herc bought him a puppy. Chuck just wanted to be with his dad. 

His dad joined the PPDC, raised him like a good little soldier. He got top marks, worked his ass off, practically shone a sign down on himself that he hoped his dad would notice. They’re Drift Compatible, Chuck found irony in that, and despite how well they work, there’s always a strain.

They’re at the end, Stacker Pentecost’s words ringing in his head. This time Herc and Chuck don’t say goodbye. Chuck’s the one leaving this time. Hercules just told Stacker, “That’s my son you got there." 

Chuck gets his wish.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://shyfoxes.tumblr.com/post/175097290888/goodbye-chuck-hansen-herc-hansen-jaegercon


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bingo: Coffee
> 
> Raleigh wanders around after Yancy’s death, and then he finds a cafe called Drift Compatible.

Hong Kong wasn’t a place Raleigh Becket had thought he’d be. He had been born and lived all their lives in Anchorage, Alaska, with a life he used to think he could never imagine leaving behind. His parents died when he was young, leaving him and his older brother, Yancy behind. They were close, falling into a lifestyle that patched up that wound as best as it could, and relied on one another. Yancy was Raleigh’s hero, farther back than he could ever pinpoint, despite Raleigh eventually surpassing Yancy in height. 

Raleigh remembered joking around that morning with Yancy. He’d catapulted into Yancy’s bed, knocking Yancy awake with an elbow in his side. He had rattled on the bathroom door to mess with his brother. He’d eaten breakfast with him and laughed across the table with Yancy. 

Then he’d gotten a call at his job at a construction site telling him Yancy was dead. Raleigh had wandered around with the news in his head until he was numb. He buried Yancy with his parents, took a bag with some clothes and photos and whatever money could get his hands on and just left.

-

He wound up in Hong Kong, not entirely sure why. He’d talked about traveling a lot with Yancy, and all the places they’d go one day. Hong Kong had been first on their list. He wandered around Victoria Peak and out at Victoria Harbor, in the early hours of the morning. He had wandered around until the blaring sign of a coffee shop called Drift Compatible. 

“Looking for a cup of coffee, or are you content to stare at the sign?”

Raleigh turned, watching as a man in suspenders and a little blue bow tie with a slight wry grin jingled his keys and opened up shop. The man held the door open for him, gesturing for him to enter.

“You look like hell,” the man said as Raleigh entered. “We don’t have alcohol. You’ll have to go down the street for that.”

“No, coffee’s fine, thanks,” Raleigh said.

After a few moments, the man came back, with an apron around his waist, and a name tag - Tendo - on his shirt. He passed the cup to Raleigh. 

“I’m guessing you didn’t get up to wander Hong Kong at five in the morning to catch a sunrise,” Tendo said. 

Raleigh let the cup warm his hands. He chuckled blandly, eyeing a booth. He said, “You’re not wrong.” then slumped down in the booth. Half way through his cup of coffee, his eyes slid shut.

-

When Raleigh woke up, a woman with blue fringes framing her face was placing a new, hot cup of coffee in front of him. She smiled at him softly. Her name tag read Mako.

“Tendo says you’ve been here since we opened up this morning,” Mako said.

Raleigh glanced to Tendo, ordering three boys to the left of him to stop goofing around and clean the tables. The three of them, triplets, shared a secret chuckle between them and pretended to salute Tendo.

“Sorry,” Raleigh blurted, hastily sipping his coffee. Mako glanced back at the triplets, seemingly making a game out of their job. 

He jutted his hand out after he set the cup down on the saucer. He hastily rubbed it on his jeans and then jutted it back at her.

“Raleigh Becket.”

Mako chuckled, grabbing his hand, “Mako Mori.”

-

When Raleigh went to bed at night in his hotel room, the city alive outside his window, he raked his fingers over his father’s dog tag. One each had been given to his father’s sons. He buried Yancy’s with him. He held it in his fist, and hoped Yancy could hear him.

-

In the following week, Raleigh found himself heading straight for Drift Compatible at five every morning. Raleigh leaned against the wall separating the cafe from the laundromat next door, head turned skyward as he watching the early morning coming on. He only had to wait a few minutes until Tendo came, seemingly inexhaustible at any hour of the day. Tendo always patted him on the cheek, said to him, “Morning, Becket-boy”, before flinging the doors open for the two of them. He drank down a coffee and ate coffee cakes with Cheung, Hu, and Jin Wei. He sat with Mako behind the cafe on her breaks, taking about everything and sometimes not talking at all.

They shared the dozens of pastries Tendo and Hu made in the kitchen, and Mako’s lunches. Mako asked him how he ended up in Hong Kong all the way from Alaska, listened to him retell his loss of his parents, and his life with Yancy. She told him about the death of her parents, how Stacker had found her, crying and wandering the streets of Tanegashima, holding her little red shoe. They sat leaning against each other, not speaking, and completely comfortable. 

One week later, Tendo was throwing an apron at Raleigh’s head, as Hu fastened it around his head, and Cheung and Jin proceeded to push him around in a circle, hollering excitedly. By the time he had wretched the apron off his head, he had turned in time to greet Mako with a wide grin. She glanced at the apron, grinning.

Raleigh looked over his name tag, traced the lettering. It felt weird, being simply “Raleigh” without Yancy. He watched the Wei Triplets, saw the closeness between the three of them that couldn’t be so easily defined by a term like “family”. 

He saw it when a man named Stacker dropped right before Mako’s lunch breaks, a small lunch Raleigh didn’t need to guess was handmade in his hands. Stacker was Mako’s adopted father; a tall, strong man, with an unfathomable soft spot for his daughter. Raleigh saw it in the way Mako looked at Stacker and when Stacker smiled gently at her.

-

“I’ve been meaning to ask for a while,” Raleigh said. “Why’s the cafe named ‘Drift Compatible’?”

He and Mako were lying back on some old lawn chairs behind the cafe. An old stray cat was perched on an overturned box a couple feet from them, dozing. Mako passed him a soda can.

“Its a term I learned from my father,” Mako said. “It’s…when two people share memories, emotions, a bond. It’s like they’ve become one, built a bridge.”

“The Drift,” Mako said. “Is where all these things exist. When you find that person, or persons, then you’re Drift Compatible.”

Drift compatible. Raleigh let the word roll over in his head, thinking back to Yancy. Thinking back to curling into his brother’s bed the nights following their parents’ death. He was fifteen, and Yancy nineteen, the two of them too big and bulky for their each individual beds, and curled together in the cold island of their parents’ bed. He thought back to the fights they had and the eventual reconciliations that quickly followed. 

Raleigh looked to Mako, thinking about her loss, the death of her parents. The love and respect she held for Stacker, not unlike his own for Yancy. He thought of how she had shared it with him, her pain, and how they had simply just fit like puzzle pieces and understood.

Raleigh grinned softly, reaching for Mako’s hand, giving it a gentle squeeze.

“Kind of like you and me,” Raleigh said.

“Exactly like you and me,” Mako said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://shyfoxes.tumblr.com/post/57293306139/drift-compatible-raleigh-mako


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tendo and Mako spend a day together. Also, Tendo shares his style in fashion.

Wherever Stacker Pentecost went, Mako was trailing close behind him. Stacker’s posture was still straight, proper and strong. But there was a lighter and slower step to his gait that was only slightly imperceptible. At least to Tendo Choi. A light-hearted joke amongst the crew at the Tokyo Shatterdome was that they were like a mother duck and her baby. 

When Stacker thought no one was watching, he’d swing Mako around to stand on his feet, holding her little hands, and they’d walk around his office as if they were a Jaeger parting the ocean. (Its a memory Tendo will hold close for years to come).

When Mako couldn’t be in Stacker’s company, she tended to stay close to his office, curled up on the little couch in there, asleep under one of the Marshall’s spare coats. (Which said Marshall may or may not have left casually lying around for that very purpose.)

Tendo Choi lounged out in the hallway adjacent to the mess hall, a freshly burnt cigarette butt between his fore and middle fingers when Mako came up to him.

Tendo tipped his head to her, and flicked the cigarette butt into the trash can next to him. “What’s up, Mako?”

“Tendo,” Mako said. “Will you spend the day with me, please?”

Tendo bent down and offered his arm out to her. She giggled, as he pressed a hand over his heart.

“Miss Mori, it would be a pleasure to be in your company.”

She wound her arm around his as they marched along the hallway.

-

Tendo rifled quickly through the clothing rack, occasionally picking up something before putting it back. He swung around to Mako, who sat on a lopsided bench by the dressing stalls. He spread his arms out, clothes hanging from his arms as he gently laid a pants and shirt on her lap and gestured to the stall.

“Try those out, I think they’ll do,” He said, with a nod.

Mako hopped down and slipped into the stall. When she emerged, she was smoothing down her shirt and looking up at him with a smile. Tendo set a finger to his chin, then flashed her a thumb’s up.

Tendo sifted through a couple bins until he found an x-small sized pair of suspenders and a few bows and hair clips. He put a small box of hair dye down on the counter, too. One the purchases were made, Tendo scooped Mako up in one arm, and hung the bag off his other arm and made the trek back to the Shatterdome.

-

Mako stood on a chair, clad in a blue button-down shirt tucked into her little black pants. She pulled at her suspenders with a grin, as Tendo fixed her little bow-tie. He’d dyed the tips of her hair blue and pulled back the bangs that fell in her face with a bow before primping it up a bit. 

“Very fashionable, Miss Mori,” Tendo said with a grin.

“Very fashionable, Mr. Choi,” Mako said, before giggling.

-

Aleksis Kaidonovsky shot Tendo a look when he and Mako strutted down the hallway to the Mission Control Center, and he hiked up an office chair for her to see over the controls. Tendo spent the day pointing out switches and wires and buttons to her as she roved over them all with avid interest. Her eyes had light up when he’d shown her an image of Cherno Alpha as Sasha and Aleksis drifted and they engaged in neural bridge.

“See that? Neural handshake good and strong,” Tendo said.

Mako touched the screen, tracing over Cherno Alpha’s head. “I want to be a Ranger, too.”

Tendo smiled secretly, watching her look back at Cherno Alpha, as it moved it’s limbs before moving out of the hangar. He tapped her on the shoulder.

“Let’s go watch them kick some Kaiju butt,” Tendo said. He flipped on the little TV in the corner and pulled her chair up close to see Cherno Alpha deliver a strong blow to the Kaiju’s head. Her excitement kept a smile plastered to his face the rest of the day.

-

Tendo laid down several sheets of paper, and produced a pack of crayons he’d picked up to give to Mako some time ago. He laid down on his belly on the floor with her. She drew the beginnings of a Jaeger head. He recognized it as Coyote Tango, and the little figure of Stacker standing on the Jaeger’s head. 

-

When Stacker came back, met with the sight of Mako and Tendo, making schematics and blueprints for new Jaegers on the floor of the Mission Control Center, dressed alike, he only raised an eyebrow.

“Mr. Choi, Mako,” Stacker said, in greeting. 

Mako jumped to her feet and went to hug Stacker around his leg. She smiled up at him, as Stacker let a gentle smile of his own cross his face. The question of their attire went unsaid but Tendo only smirked.

“ We’re making blueprints for future Jaegers, Marshall,” Tendo said. “Right, Miss Mori?”

“Right, Mr. Choi!” Mako said.

Stacker touched the blue patch of Mako’s hair, looking at Tendo again, who shrugged. “Miss Mori is a very fashionable young lady,” Tendo said.

-

Years later, Tendo found a periwinkle #1 Dad mug placed on his usual seat, with a little picture he’d recognized as a blueprint he and a young Mako had drawn together. He saw Mako later in the Mess Hall with a few of the other PPDC recruits, the fringes of her hair a bright blue. Mako caught his eye and Tendo raised his cup at her. They shared a secret smile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> https://shyfoxes.tumblr.com/post/57083588047/very-fashionable-mako-tendo-choi
> 
> The #1 Dad Mug is from this picture  
> https://moonjellybeans.tumblr.com/post/56858391241/a-follow-up-to-this-post-in-the-novel-tendo-is

**Author's Note:**

> just posting some old fics so I don't lose them. May one day come back and pour my heart back in again.


End file.
